Frank Knott (President, Barongara Dog Obedience Club): Most people don’t realise it but we’re in the middle of a pet explosion. Right now we’re taking on three or four new dogs a week, and turning away the same kinds of numbers – and that’s just the obedience classes. People aren’t having children any more; they’re making families out of their pets. Couples are turning up here with quality breeds, smart purebreds, and they’re giving them a lot of time and attention. So what we’re seeing is a lot of dogs doing good times now, and a much higher standard in the agility generally.

Alice Goran (Treasurer, Barongara Dog Obedience Club): The first time she ran the dog was at Sunday training. Bear in mind no one had ever seen her teach that dog a damn thing. But she’d been watching us work our dogs for weeks, from right down there near the gate. Then out of the blue she turned up with this flea-bitten creature – lugging her drip with her up the gravel driveway mind you. Frank walked across and intercepted her before she made it up to the clubhouse. Of course you’re not supposed to run a dog unless you’re a paid-up member but I reckon he must have felt sorry for her. He asked the people on course to tether their dogs and give her some room. And even Kathy Clingan, she’s such an interfering bitch normally, well she managed to keep her mouth shut for once.

Marg Delaney (school crossing supervisor): The whole town knew she was getting sick long before it was official. She had this raccoon-eyes look all the time, and after a while I noticed she wasn’t keeping up with the other kids. She’d just be slow-shuffling along all by herself. One day she caught her foot on the gutter, and she went down hard right onto her face. I went to help her and she turned to me and started giving me poison, saying that she’s not dead yet so I should just fuck off and leave her alone. She said it as rough as that. It was terrible to hear it. A man’s words – her father’s words – coming out of a young girl’s mouth. She crawled across the grass and pulled herself up with the help of a street-sign. It broke my heart to have to watch it, and it makes me uncomfortable even standing here telling you about it, but that’s what happened.

John Russell (neighbour): The paint had peeled away from their house so it was all the way back to the wood, like it had never been painted in the first place. And the roof was just corrugated rust. He used to be a builder by trade so there’s no reason he couldn’t have done a bit of maintenance, but he had some bullshit story about a back injury. That man killed his wife, you know? He made her climb up onto the roof to adjust the TV antenna. The whole time he’s standing in the yard below, checking out the reception through the window, and screaming out at her “A bit more to the left! Jesus Christ! Not that much! What the hell are you doing?”

Next thing she loses her balance and slips right off the edge of the roof. Pulls the whole antenna down after her. The fall broke her back, then about half a second later the antenna lands on her head cracks her skull open, and her brains are squirted about three-quarters of the way across the lawn. I don’t know why they didn’t lock him up for stupidity and take those kids away then. The man had no idea about raising children at all. At that time the girl was barely walking and the boy, not much older. He’d let them run around the yard like they were pets, shitting down the back where the dogs shitted, until they got old enough to know better. Patricia next door says she saw the boy feeding his sister dog food, forking it straight out of the can. It’s no wonder she ended up like she did.

Frank Knott: I don’t think anybody could’ve said no to her, a sick child. I certainly couldn’t. When she came towards the clubhouse that day, trying to manage that mongrel dog and wheeling a drip on a stand, I knew what she was going to ask me and I’d already decided what to do. I thought it’ll only be a few minutes, so she could let the dog have a go on the slalom and maybe watch it baulk a couple of jumps, no one will mind. The paid-up members leashed their dogs to give her some space, and not a single person complained, to their credit. They were probably wondering the same as I was, why the hell an unsociable little girl like Lexi Catter got it in her head to come down here to play with her dogs in front of everyone.

Matt Kayne (neighbour): My mother, in her high tone, used to say the Catter family had suburban standards of virtue. I don’t know exactly what that meant but I knew it wasn’t a compliment. Mr Catter was the biggest arsehole you could ever meet. Truly. He’d get drunk and bash those kids right out into the street. Knock them down then help them straight up into another back-hander. Of course everyone said that’s why Lexi got sick, but I‘m pretty sure you can’t beat the leukemia into a child.

David Baensch: So then she shuffled out to the starting line like she knew what she was doing, and the dog padded out behind. When she stopped, it sat down and leaned against her leg. We all stood around looking awkward because there wasn’t really much else to do. She flicked her hand just a touch, and the dog bolted. The first three jumps he took just like bang, bang bang. I was just completely stunned. We all were. It takes years of training to get a dog comfortable like that, and there he was making it look like a natural behaviour. A dog cannot instinctively do the slalom, you have to train it from a puppy, but he didn’t fault, just weaved in and out, then like lightning through the tunnel. We’re there, our mouths hanging open, because what we were seeing didn’t add up. This dog knew the course like it had run it a thousand times – a course it had never, ever seen. She just stood quietly and waited for it to finish. And it finished the whole course without a single word or command. Try and explain how that is even possible. How can you? You can’t. Nobody can.

Kathy Clingan: Trigger sounds like a cute name you might give to a horse or a pony, but it wasn’t like that. Her other dogs were named Rifle and Bullet. That’s what I mean when I say she was not an ordinary little girl – she wasn’t normal and that dog wasn’t normal either. A handler will normally jog ahead and show the way. Sure, a clever dog will get to know the layout at its home club, but they’ll still need to be led around when they’re competing away from home. No dog is smart enough to figure it out for itself.

She just stood there and watched it jump and weave and tunnel around the obstacles. By the time it had finished you could have heard a pin drop. Frank didn’t waste any time either. He was straight into her ear, asking her back for the Saturday competition. And I’m pretty sure the membership fees came out of his back pocket because the Catters couldn’t have afforded it, that’s for sure.

Mark Favore (Manager, Barongara General Store): They don’t like to keep these kids in hospital any more than they have to, and that suited her fine. They gave her a drip that put who-knows-what chemicals into her arm and sent her home. The drip stand was on wheels, so she could easily walk around with it without unplugging herself. I think the intention was for her to have an easier time getting around the house, but Lexi Catter didn’t give two shits about intentions, and neither did her father for that matter. It was a big, shiny chrome thing and she’d drag it behind her all over town. He’d send her up here to buy tobacco and papers off me and if I didn’t keep an eye on her she’d be stuffing chocolates into the front of her pants. She knew full well she couldn’t hide anything under her clothes, given how thin she was. When the wind sucked her clothes against her body you could count her ribs right through the fabric. She’d try to hide a box of Smarties or a Polly Waffle and it would be sticking out from her like a magnet on a fridge.

Alice Goran: I’ve never seen Frank so excited the whole time I’ve been at the club. We all knew exactly what he was up to. He’d seen the opportunity to finally get one over the Chang lady in the weekend competition. By Saturday he was full of nervous excitement when Lisa Chang’s Landcruiser pulled up. He was over in the carpark before she’d even got a foot out of the car, and he’s all smiles, wishing her the best of luck. He already knew she was going to get beaten and he just wanted to start rubbing it in early – relish the moment, if you get my drift.

Tom Bartlett: Lisa Chang owned an incredibly smart Australian cattle dog that didn’t speak a single word of English. She’d just be gibbering at it in Asian the whole time and waving her arms about, and the dog would perform like a robot, no playfulness about it at all. No sense of humour there, in the dog or the owner.

The thing you have to understand about dog agility, it’s not just a matter of the dog running flat out the whole time. There’s a lot of strategy involved. The good handlers, you’ll see them pace out the course when they arrive. They’re looking for the problem areas and working out how they’re going to tackle them. You have to know your dog real well. How it thinks, how to play on its strengths ahead of time. A handler can’t move anywhere near as fast as a dog, so they have to work out exactly where to stand, how to move around the obstacles. Mostly they need to maintain eye contact with the dog and instruct it through all the spots where it might get confused. It’s called layering, and knowing when you can trust your dog’s doing the right thing, that’s good layering, and that’s what wins medals.

Simon D’Lauro: Lisa Chang did everything right that day. Her dog ran a near-perfect run, and she knew it. From about half way around it was going to be a good time. She had such a smug look on her face, like she’d already won. But she didn’t know what we knew, and all the members did their best to keep their poker faces, shoo-ing imaginary flies away to cover up their smiles.

Remember by this time most of the town had heard the story of Lexi Catter and her magical agility dog, but you can’t really believe something like that until you see it with your own eyes. A lot of the locals showed up that day looking to see a so-called miracle, and can I tell you they didn’t go away disappointed.

David Baensch: By the time they read out Lexi’s name over the loudspeaker there was a big crowd, maybe three or four people deep, around the agility course. Some people who had heard about it on the grapevine had just pulled up their cars over at the roadside and came to watch from the outer fence.

Lexi wasn’t looking real good that day, all haggard, not healthy at all – like skin stretched over a skeleton. In the bright sun she looked pasty white, as if someone should be standing over her with an umbrella to keep her from frying up. There were people pushing their faces hard up against the fence, lining their eyes up with the gaps in the mesh. On a normal day nobody would be this interested in dog agility.

When the starter’s gun went it took off, everyone’s eyes were on the dog. It was amazing, it really was. It just tore up the hurdles, didn’t even break stride. People were so intent on watching it they didn’t even notice Lexi had collapsed. There’s no way she could even have seen the dog properly then, folded so awkwardly onto her own legs. Not that it made a shit of difference anyway, the dog just bulleted through, flowing from one obstacle cleanly into the next. Trigger crossed the line in 28 seconds. It’s one of those Don Bradman type of records that will never be beaten, and this was without being coaxed through.

Compare that to Lisa Chang. When her dogs ran, the whole time round she’d be peppering them in machine-gun Chinese. We all saw Lexi as being our secret weapon against her, and to this day I wonder if we really had any right to. Lexi never even got to see Trigger’s victory. She’d spent the best part of his run tipped over forward with her head bowed down in the dirt.

The dog got to her first, licking her hair and scraping at her arm with his paw. A few people tried to get closer but Trigger put his hackles up and pulled his lips back to show his teeth, barking sharply if anybody took a step too close. It was Lisa Chang that was able to finally to talk it down, and the irony of that was lost on no one. She moved in with her body low and spoke with a soft voice, and Trigger just started making that grumbling sound that dogs make. Lisa knelt down and put a hand on Lexi’s cheek, and said soothing things, and Lexi used one arm to pull herself over onto her back, and just lay there with all the energy drained out of her, staring at the sky.

Simon D’Lauro: I drove Lexi home that day. I helped her into the car and the dog sat in the front with her, under her feet. I tried to make conversation but I couldn’t get a word out of her, so I gave up trying and just let her sit in her own stillness. When I pulled into her driveway Luke, her brother, was standing out there like he knew we were coming. He opened the car door and held his hand out to her, and she balanced on his arm all the way up the steps and into the house. Her father didn’t even show his face, but Luke came back out to me. He shook my hand and said thank you for bringing her home, and I said don’t mention it, and that was it. He chained up the dog and disappeared into the house.

Matt Kayne: In a small town like this, when people hear an ambulance they’re straight out in the street to see what’s happened. This time they must have known already but it didn’t stop them from coming to look anyway. The paramedics went into her house, and nobody came out for what seemed like an eternity. People were just hovering about trying to find excuses to stay in their yards, rechecking the mailbox and picking at imaginary weeds.

When Lexi came out she was propped up on the gurney with her head on two layers of pillows. She was moving her head from side to side slowly, but with her eyes pressed shut, looking just like my wife does when she’s battling a migraine.

There was puke running down the front of her nightie and the ambulance guys had it all over their shirts too. The dogs looked anxious and confused, sharking around the yard, but Lexi opened her eyes and she reached out to them, and they sat right down on their bellies and just watched. Even as she was lifted into the ambulance she just kept her eyes turned towards the dogs, and her hand stretched towards them. Then the ambulance doors were swung closed and we couldn’t see her any more.

And that’s how it happened, as uneventful as that, and I still remember how it felt to see it. Life had thrust so many hardships upon that poor girl with such a careless indignity. And so it ended the same, with the whole street standing out gawking at her in what was possibly one of the saddest moments of her miserable life. The ambulance drove away and the street was full of people but no one knew where to look. We couldn’t look at each other. And no one spoke about Lexi Catter for a long time, because there was nothing to say.

Luke Catter (brother): After she died, the brown one disappeared. The other two hung around though. Rifle died last year and that’s Trigger over there. He sleeps like that most of the time and he’s a bit deaf now but I can clap my hands together when it’s time to eat, and he’ll come. That’s all he does though. I could never make him sit or roll over or anything like that. Lexi could make those dogs do whatever she wanted.

The night before she went to hospital for the last time, I remember waking up and looking over, and her bed was empty. From other end of the house I heard that hollow sound her drip made, clanking across the pavers out back. I was only young then, and didn’t really like to be alone in the dark, so I just waited and waited for her to come back. But eventually I got scared, and I yelled out to Dad that Lexi had gone outside. He yelled right back at me that she’d be back if she got cold enough, and maybe I should shut the fuck up so he could get some sleep.

I shut my eyes and tried to sleep but I just couldn’t. Lexi was stick thin by then, and it was a cold night. I remember tiptoeing past Dad’s bedroom into the kitchen, and I opened the fridge a crack to let some light into the room. The back door was wide open, and past that the night was so inky black I couldn’t work up the courage to walk out into it. So I climbed up on the kitchen sink and looked and looked, until eventually I could just make out her shape in the yard, down where we kept the dogs. We’d usually keep them chained up out the back because they’d been in trouble so many times, bothering the postman and stuff. They were such vicious bastards of things and they wouldn’t let anyone to go near them. Except for Lexi of course.

It was so dark I could barely see, and I wondered if I was imagining it, and if she really was out there at all. Then the moon came out from a cloud and I saw all of them lit up. She’d let them off the chain, and they were playing with her, jumping around like puppies. She’d grab them by the head and twist them to the ground and they’d roll on their backs and stick their legs straight up in the air. They were so gentle like that with her, they always had been. Then they all crawled up on their bellies and rested their chins on her chest, and she started talking, and when she spoke to them they all stopped and listened. Every part of them was still except for their ears, twitching at the sound of her voice.

She was lying flat on her back and had raised a finger pointing up into the night sky. She said look at the moon Rifle, and Rifle looked up at the moon. She said that’s the Big Dipper there Trigger, and Trigger lifted his head off her stomach and looked straight up, right at the exact spot to where she was pointing.

I don’t know how long I was there, but I forgot all about being tired and cold, and for a while I even forgot that I was scared of the night. I still have a clear memory of it now, sat there on the sink between all the dirty dishes with my face pressed against the window, just watching them for ages.

After a long time the clouds drifted in and covered the moon again, and the night chewed away at the edges of them so much I was sure they were no longer there, and I thought maybe that’s how she was going to go away – she’d just be gone when the sun came up. It’s like the monster that every kid has seen in their closet. It frightens you so much you’re afraid to even move. But sooner or later you have to work up the courage to pass your hand through the place you think it is, because that’s the only way you can be sure it’s really gone.